Just months old when his father died of influenza during the pandemic of 1918, Miniel, an only child, was left alone after his mother died about 12 years later.

“She developed pellagra,” a diseased caused by a lack of niacin, Arroyo said. She added that had it been just a few years later, it could have been treated.

Miniel was able to stay in school because of his mother’s foresight in buying a life insurance policy for $1,000.

“She had delegated the principal at the school (where she worked) to handle her son’s finances,” Arroyo said. “Every year, he would give him a small amount of money; he took care of my dad for 15 years.”

Miniel was attending what was then Texas A&I University when he received the last $25 of the insurance money.

Miniel already was supplementing his income by working as a lab assistant and selling hamburgers at a nearby plaza.

“By the time the first summer was over, he was buying 300 ButterKrust buns every Friday, charging 10 or 15 cents … per hamburger,” Arroyo said. “He was pretty resourceful.”

Graduating with degrees in physics and mathematics in 1939, Miniel was teaching in Falfurrias when he was drafted after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Marrying his fiancée at Christmas, Miniel was sent to the University of California at Los Angeles to study meteorology before being stationed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Settling up meteorological stations at the air fields in the area, Miniel and his wife “were entertaining all the brass that were flying to Africa,” Arroyo said. “It was one of the best time of their lives.”

Returning to Texas after the war, Miniel enrolled at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, attending classes the first year in an abandoned Sears building while the school was being finished.

Graduating in 1950, Miniel moved his family to San Antonio to complete a residency at Robert B. Green Hospital before opening a practice in the Alameda Theater building

Later, “he and another doctor … started a practice together,” Arroyo said. “They built the first medical building on San Saba, right behind Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital.”

Practicing medicine for more than 30 years, Miniel also invested in various properties around the city, including ranches and apartment buildings.

After losing his youngest daughter in a car accident in the late 1970s, Miniel and his wife began selling some of their assets, including the home in Olmos Park in which they had raised their six children.

“It was just the two of them, so they decided to sell it and bought a smaller home,” Arroyo said.

Retiring from medicine in the early 1980s, Miniel and his wife traveled all over the world.